​A new ten-year plan

The Australian Federal Minister for Education and Training, Simon Birmingham, is launching today a new ten-year plan for The mathematical sciences in Australia, which has been developed by the Australian Academy of Science. It contains three key recommendations:

Increase their provision of professional development for existing out-of-field school teachers of maths and recruit and retain more qualified teachers

Fund a new national research centre in the mathematical sciences

Make an intermediate maths subject a prerequisite for all bachelors’ programs in science, engineering and commerce.

I’ve been looking into the challenges of getting more people involved in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and the third recommendation caught my eye – it’s a classic example of the law of unintended consequences.​It's not just students of STEM courses that are going to be impacted though, the recommendation to include commerce courses in the intermediary maths prerequisite is going to make plenty of waves. No everyone studying commerce wants to be a quant or a trader – so I can see a lot of the students majoring in the less mathematically inclined parts of commerce degree, or the common Commerce/Marketing and Commerce/Law degree combinations having to brush up on their maths a bit.

​Alluring, but flawed

On the surface, making intermediate maths a prerequisite for science and engineering is an attractive idea – too few students are finishing high school with the necessary maths skills to take on STEM courses. They either end up at a serious disadvantage, and struggle during their courses (which is reflected in higher drop-out rates) or need to spend time taking remedial courses to get their skills up to the required level. Making the courses compulsory sends a clear signal to prospective students of what to expect in a university level course.​​So why the need to enforce intermediate level maths? Well it’s because high school students are turning off it in droves.

Part of the problem is how maths is taught. One of the key factors for student engagement is the quality of teaching – inspirational teachers make their subjects more enjoyable for students. Hence, key recommendation #1 – train out of field teachers better (more teachers confident in maths means less teaching to the textbook), and recruit and keep more qualified teachers.

So far, so obvious. But the proposed ten-year plan is solving the wrong problem. First of all, it’s written by the Academy of Science, and it reads like there’s a degree of professional capture going on here. While there’s some lip service paid to vocational training in the document, there’s an underlying assumption permeating the plan – that higher levels of STEM capability in the population is primarily driven by the linear process of studying STEM subjects at high school, getting a university STEM degree and then on to the workforce.​​But more than half of people employed in STEM roles don’t have a university degree in a STEM subject. Most have diploma/associate degree or industry qualifications. And in those spaces, employers have been making it very clear that they’re struggling to find staff with the right skills (e.g. maths) to fill those roles.

​Perverse Disincentives

And this is where key recommendation #3 – making intermediate maths compulsory – breaks down. It only guides those students who were already planning on doing a STEM or commerce degree at university. For anyone else wanting to work in a STEM field, there’s actually a perverse disincentive to studying intermediate level maths.First, to understand the unintended consequences from this recommendation, you need to understand a bit about how the university/vocational training entrance process works in Australia. Students are making what courses to take in their later years in high school based on three criteria:

How much they enjoy a subject

What prerequisites it meets for further study/training

How highly they can score in particular subjects

It’s the last point that’s critical here – in effect, student high school course choices are like a market. Students are trying to balance a trade-off – not all courses are created equal, some attract more able students than others. A high mark in a course populated by more able students means a higher ranking (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank or ATAR) for access to university and/or vocational training. So high school kids are faced with a tough decision – higher marks in an easier course (or at least one populated by less able students) or potentially lower marks in a harder course. And when it comes to intermediate maths, they’ve been voting with their feet for years – switching out from intermediate and advanced maths to elementary maths.​​If the requirement to make intermediate high school maths compulsory for STEM/commerce degrees means an influx of more able students into the subject, then students who aren’t confident about a strong score in intermediate maths will be looking elsewhere. This in turn means less students with intermediary maths skills in precisely the areas where we need them most – the non-degree STEM jobs where the majority of STEM workers are employed. In an advanced economy like Australia’s, these knowledge worker roles are critical and increasingly in demand.

​So how do we arrest the slide in students taking intermediate maths?

I said earlier that high school course choices are like a market. The thing that’s missing here are the things that markets respond to – incentives.

Currently, high school subject choices are treated equally when calculating the university and/or vocational training ranking - no one course is more valued over another. But there is an adjustment for the ability of the group of students taking the course to allow for the comparison of scores across courses. If year 12 intermediate maths and ancient history courses are taken by groups of equally able students,then the same score in either course is equivalent for ranking purposes.​​But with all due respect to the scholarship and contribution of the discipline of ancient history, our modern economy doesn’t rise and fall on the number of students with a working knowledge of the works of Cicero or the rise and fall of the Byzantine Empire. If we’re serious about producing a body of students with the skills the economy needs, then the value we place on certain high school courses needs to change. If we want more students of all abilities to study intermediate maths, then we need an incentive that they will respond to. We need to increase the contribution that intermediate maths makes when ranking for access to university and/or vocational training:

At a minimum, compensate less able intermediate maths students for the expected influx of more able students into intermediate maths due to the proposed changes

Boost the relative ranking for students scoring in the low to middle bands in intermediate maths to make it a more attractive option over other subjects

It’s all well and good to make intermediary maths compulsory for STEM and commerce degrees – if minimum standards need to be called out, fine. But if we’re to get more students to get the intermediate maths skills they need, especially those not planning on studying for a degree at university, then the risk of a lower ranking for access to university and/or vocational training isn’t going to help. We need positive incentives to make more students, particularly those who wouldn't see themselves on the university STEM/commerce degree track, to consider intermediate maths.

XYZ Printing's da Vinci series of 3D printers have been a major player in the market for a number of years now. I was chatting to a rep from Multimedia Technologies at the Education Technology Specialists booth about the latest da Vinci jr model.

The RRP AUD $799 price point for the da Vinci jr places it below the critical $1,000 barrier, meaning it gets consideration as a tool for the home, as well as in a school. While it's priced a lot cheaper that a lot of other 3D printers in the market, it's no slouch, with Wi-Fi connectivity and the ability to print an object 150x150x150mm.

While the conference venue at the Australian Technology Park is awesome (all that old machinery still on display in the Locomotive Workshop!), it has one major limitation on a hot day - no air-conditioning. Luckily the wonderful team at Liana Raine Artisan Pops saved the day with complimentary ice blocks. The Apple, Rhubarb & Ginger one I tried was awesome.

First up Mullion Creek Public School putting on a very cute demonstration that brings together bees, robotics and dance. Who knew that was a thing?

Apparently it is. It's a bit hard to see from the video, but the robot bees on the mat have markers attached to them, so when they do their wiggle dance (similar to bees in the hive indicating the position of nectar to their fellows) they trace patterns on the mat.

Before the demonstration (not in the video unfortunately) we got an informative talk on why bees are important to agriculture and overall environmental well-being.

Next up, the Education Technology Specialists booth where the Ozobot Bit 2.0 caught my eye. This tiny robot (it's approximately the size of a golf ball) traces a colour coded path on the ground, performing different operations (turn, reverse, flash the LED's on it's top, etc.) based on the colours it encounters. In the video above, it's running on a pre-printed card, but kids can lay out their own tracks using paper and marker pens of different colours. In this way, kids can be introduced to elementary programming instructions, but in a purely physical way.

Older kids_ aren't left out - using the supplied OzoBlockly App and programming language (similar to Scratch or Hopscotch) can program the Ozobot Bit to perform pre-programmed manoeuvres, avoid obstacles, etc.

The Ozobot Bit 2.0 is powered by a LiPo in-built battery that charges in an hour via a USB cable. More info at the Ozobot website.

One of the first stops was the TNS Distribution stand, where I got to talk to the helpful team and see a demonstration of the very cool LittleBits electronic kits.

Unlike other electronics kits, the LittleBits components are magnetised, so snapping them together is no more challenging than clicking together a couple of lego blocks. This would be a boon to parents and educators scared off by the hassle and health and safety implications of mixing soldering irons and kids.

Add in a simple colour coding scheme to make it clear what actions each component performs, and a simple click-on D Cell power supply and these look like a really interesting introduction to electronics. While the team told me there's no real lower limit to the age groups that can use the kits ("As long as the kids are old enough not to swallow the components") older age groups are served by an Arduino connector that makes all the components programmable and externally controlled.

TechiWorx will be at the National Future Schools Expo in Sydney, Australia on 3-4 March 2016 to check out the exhibitors and the content on display. If we get time we might try and do some live-blogging from the event.

We're going to check out some of the sessions - some of the highlights that interest us include:

Growing Digital Citizens

How to introduce the Language of Coding to Children in the Primary School

I've spend the last couple of days working on the TechiWorx site and it's associated tech. For those who are interested, it's a Weebly site, with some tuning and cropping of the images in Adobe Photoshop CC 2015.

We're running Microsoft Office 365 as a our e-mail (Outlook/Exchange), instant messaging (Skype for Buisness) and cloud storage (SharePoint Online). I'm doing a heck of a lot of research and note taking, and that's being captured in OneNote (desktop version, so I can take advantage of handwriting recognition on my Windows tablet).

I've worked in IT for 20 years and in my spare time have developed a number of websites, but I've been pleasantly surprised at how easy it's been to pull together all the platforms and bend them to our will. If anything, getting the systems up and running has been the easiest part of it - leaving more time for the hard yards of research and content production.,

Of course I've learnt a few tricks along the years, but there's really nothing stopping a non-IT person getting a pretty big online presence in place for their business for a couple of hundred dollars and a couple of days effort.

I've been working on getting the TechiWorx site set up (more about that here), and one of the jobs that took the longest was picking out the stock images to use for the site. It's tedious, but the job is made a lot easier by the various stock photography websites around - like shutterstock and istockphoto. These aren't Mum and Dad operations, they're big corporations (istockphoto is owned by Getty images, one of the biggest image and photography services in the world) offering up hundreds of thousands of images each.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I'm working on some ideas for STEM (science, technology, engineering & maths) content for girls, so I wanted some of the website imagery to reflect that. Easy I thought, how hard can it be to find some images of girls interacting with STEM? The results were a bit of an eye opener - which I guess I should have expected, but I was still a bit taken aback.

​When I searched for "coding woman", rather than cheery images of women cutting computer code, their monitors washing them in the dull glow of integrated development environments and C# - I got women on the red carpet, women shopping, almost anything but women even in the vicinity of a computer. The first image up was a woman putting her PIN 'code' into an ATM. Not what I had been expecting.

"But of the 87 images on that first page, only four even had a woman associating with a computer"

The offending image - a woman entering her PIN 'code' - and probably about to get robbed. Charming...

In fact when you look at the images, almost none of them had women having anything to do with a computer. Now in fairness to shutterstock and their design director, I don't think that they're particularly sexist in this regard (depressingly, my experience with other sites was similar) - and to a degree these sites are a reflection of the images that are constructed and offered up to them by photographers. But of the 87 images on that first page, only four even had a woman associating with a computer, and all of those were below the fold.

This is what you get when you search for "coding woman", not even a computer in sight.

But it's an illustrative example of of how girls are socialised about the type of activities they should be participating in. Girls are just airbrushed out of the picture (pretty much literally in this case) when people think about STEM, and the materials they use to represent it.

Hopefully that's something we can make a contribution towards fixing. Stay tuned...